Tag Archive: It’s a Wonderful Life

“We gotta get out of this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do.” —The Animals

Claustrophobic? Then maybe the new Fox series Wayward Pines is not for you. But the previews for the new series make us think you might be miss out on something good.

Wrong place, wrong time. We’ve all encountered circumstances we wish we could reverse, but most of us haven’t stumbled into an entire town we wished we could escape from, but couldn’t. In comedy we’ve seen this on television with shows like Northern Exposure and Green Acres. In classic cinema we’ve seen it with George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life. But that’s not the kind of town we’ll be visiting soon in Wayward Pines. The obvious comparison is to that quirky Pacific Northwest town of Twin Peaks–like that cult favorite series, the protagonist is an FBI agent following up on a case in a forested town. The characters in Wayward Pines don’t appear to be as odd as the Log Lady, but we’ll learn this town is much, much darker. In fact it might have more in common with the Midwest town in Children of the Corn, the British village in Wicker Man, or Stephen King’s seaside town of Haven.

Somehow the townspeople of Wayward Pines are trapped. Like a plot pulled from an episode of sci-fi television–think The Twilight Zone’s “Nick of Time” (1960) with William Shatner, The X-Files’s episode “Arcadia” (1999), or the reboot The Twilight Zone episode “Evergreen” (2002) with Amber Tamblyn. In movies no director knows “trapped” like M. Night Shyamalan, as seen in his moody Signs (2002), The Village (2004), and The Happening (2008). So it’s no wonder his next director/executive producer project is Wayward Pines.